A SEA OF TROUBLES ENGULFS INCINERATION

The incineration industry has suffered a series of major setbacks
in recent weeks. The federal government's showcase dioxin-burning
incinerator in Jacksonville, Arkansas--to which Bill Clinton
personally gave a green light one week before he was elected
President (see RHWN #311)--was shut down last week by a federal
judge. Lawyers for EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
admitted to U.S. District Judge Stephen Reasoner in Little Rock
that the Jacksonville incinerator could not destroy 99.9999% of
the dioxin fed into it, as is required by EPA regulations,
whereupon the judge ordered the plant shut.

It was a stunning victory for Greenpeace chemist Pat Costner, who
had been the first to reveal that incinerators could not achieve
99.9999% destruction (see RHWN #312 and #280), and for local
activist-citizens like Sharon Golgan in Jacksonville who had
fought the incinerator proposal for at least six years.

The nation's other showcase incinerator--built by Waste
Technologies Industries (WTI) on the banks of the Ohio River in
East Liverpool, Ohio--was fighting for its life in federal court
in Cleveland earlier this week. Local citizens there have been
opposing the WTI incinerator proposal for 12 years. EPA's Region
5 office in Chicago and Ohio state officials bent the rules, and
even broke a few, to give WTI a permit to start burning wastes
(see RHWN #287). The state of West Virginia, local citizens, and
Greenpeace filed a lawsuit January 13 asking a federal judge to
prevent WTI from conducting a "test burn."[1] As soon as a test
burn is completed, the WTI incinerator can begin commercial
operation for up to a year while EPA evaluates the test results.
(Vice-President Al Gore said December 7, 1992, that he and Mr.
Clinton would stop WTI from proceeding until a study was
completed of all health issues, and all legal issues surrounding
EPA's issuance of a permit [see RHWN #315]]--but it now appears
that Mr. Gore has changed his mind.) Federal Judge Ann Aldrich in
Cleveland issued a temporary restraining order against WTI
January 15 and set February 16 as the day she would decide
whether to issue a preliminary injunction, which would prevent
WTI from conducting the trial burn until a full court trial
could be held.[2]

As we go to press, it is not clear how this phase of the battle
will come out. However, secret EPA documents that came to light
during in court have raised serious health questions about every
incinerator in the country, including solid waste incinerators.

Background

At issue in every instance is dioxin, which is created as an
unwanted byproduct of incineration (and as a byproduct of other
industrial processes, such as pulp and paper manufacture, and the
manufacture of some pesticides). In April, 1991, EPA began a
major "scientific reassessment" of dioxin and discovered that
effects of dioxin can be observed in human cells at the levels of
exposure now present in the environment. In other words, there's
already sufficient dioxin in the environment to produce
observable effects in humans. The Clinton/Gore administration
knows this is a problem because a December, 1992, briefing
document prepared by the EPA Transition Team says, "This [EPA's
dioxin reassessment] is likely to be an extremely controversial
document as there are new findings indicating adverse
reproductive effects at existing environmental levels."

A Secret Risk Assessment and a Leaked Memo

EPA's position throughout the 1980s has been that incineration is
safe, even though every incinerator is known to produce dioxin.
To "prove" the safety of incinerators, EPA has used a technique
called "risk assessment." A risk assessment estimates the amount
of dioxin being released, estimates various pathways it might
travel through the environment, and calculates the resulting
exposures of humans. Finally, a risk assessment estimates the
health effects resulting from the calculated exposures.

In the case of dioxin, over the years EPA's "standard" risk
assessment has assumed that airborne dioxin only enters humans
through their lungs. Dioxin that falls to the ground and is then
incorporated into the food chain and eaten has always been
ignored in EPA risk assessments.

However, the EPA's team of scientists conducting the official
"reassessment" of dioxin's toxicity published a draft report last
summer called, ESTIMATING EXPOSURE TO DIOXIN-LIKE COMPOUNDS in
which they clearly stated that a proper risk assessment for an
incinerator must include all routes of exposure for dioxin, not
merely via the lungs.[3] It is well known that dioxins accumulate
in the food chain, and that meat, milk and fish are the major
sources of dioxin exposure for humans.[4]

When Greenpeace researcher Joe Thornton did his own risk
assessment on the WTI incinerator, using the technique
recommended in EPA's draft report, including dioxins in beef and
milk, he found that WTI posed risks 10000 times higher than EPA
had calculated. To counter Thornton, EPA did its own food-chain
risk assessment, which was not released to the public, but which
came to light in court.[5] The EPA's secret risk assessment
concludes that dioxin from WTI is 1000 times more dangerous than
the "official" published EPA risk assessment says it is.

Leaving aside the serious ethical issue of EPA refusing to
publish important health and safety information about WTI, an
internal memo from Richard Guimond, acting chief of EPA's Office
of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, dated January 22, 1993,
leaked to Greenpeace, says, "There are very serious implications
associated with adopting risk assessment procedures based on
indirect exposure routes for air emission sources."[6]
Translation: if food-chain exposures are now to be counted in
incinerator risk assessments, many incinerators will be found to
be unacceptably dangerous.

The new understanding of dioxin--that it's already present in the
environment at levels that affect humans--plus the inclusion of
food-chain exposures in risk assessments, plus the failure of
incinerators to achieve the destruction efficencies required by
regulations--all seem to add up to a mushrooming debacle for the
incineration industry.

What are the alternatives to incineration?

Jacksonville holds the key

EPA scientists have known since 1985 that incinerators cannot
achieve 99.9999% efficiency in destroying wastes present in low
concentrations (see RHWN #280 and #312.), but
EPA officials have
stated at hundreds of public presentations since 1985 that
99.9999% could be achieved. Lying to the public carries no
penalty, but lying to a judge is a different matter. At the
hearing in Little Rock February 12, EPA was represented by U.S.
Justice Department lawyer Ron Spritzer. Judge Reasoner said to
Spritzer, "Indulge me for a moment. If I asked you to prove that
you could achieve a six 9 DRE [99.9999% destruction and removal
efficiency] on dioxin, could you physically produce technological
data that shows that?" "No sir, we could not," said Mr.
Spritzer.[7]

That damaging admission was sufficient for the judge. He ordered
the plant shut. EPA is considering appealing the judge's verdict,
but they do not appear to have a strong case. In all likelihood,
the Jacksonville incinerator is shut for good.

The Jacksonville incinerator was in considerable trouble even
before Judge Reasoner's decision. On January 22, an Arkansas
state official revealed that the incinerator was producing a
larger volume of hazardous waste than it was destroying. The
machine had been set up in a residential neighborhood of
Jacksonville to "destroy" 30,000 drums of hazardous liquids left
over from a defunct chemical factory that had made chemical
warfare agents on the site for many years (most recently,
herbicides for Vietnam). Local citizens had recommended moving
the waste out of town by rail, or simply building a concrete
mausoleum on the site to contain the waste safely until someone
found a way to detoxify it. But Arkansas and federal EPA
officials insisted that incineration was the safest, cheapest
solution to the problem. They convinced then-Governor Bill
Clinton to put up $10.7 million of state money to build and
operate the incinerator.

At the end of a year's burning, 9,600 drums of waste had been
"destroyed" by the Jacksonville incinerator, but in the process
the incinerator had created 12,000 drums of salt and another 1730
drums of ash (13,730 drums total) for a net gain of 43% in the
volume of waste. Furthermore, the salt and the ash are so laced
with dioxin that they are legally a "hazardous waste" and thus
cannot be taken off the site.

"We did not anticipate this," said Doug Szenher, a spokesperson
for the Arkansas state department of Pollution Control and
Ecology. "The whole idea was that the salt and ash was to have
been de-listed [declared non-hazardous] and taken to a landfill
site. It just didn't work out that way," he said.[8]

So after spending $7 million burning chemicals fruitlessly for a
year, EPA is now spending $400,000 to build a 30,000-square-foot
building on the site, to store the hazardous salt and ash until
someone can figure out how to detoxify it. So far as we know,
this is the first above-ground mausoleum built to store hazardous
waste. (See RHWN #260.) In Jacksonville, above-ground concrete
storage will soon be a real, demonstrated alternative to
incineration.
--Peter Montague, Ph.D.